Disconnected Marriage Quotes

Dignity will only happen when you realize that having someone in your life doesn’t validate your worth.

Never mistake the uncomfortable feeling of insecurity and the fear of the unknown with the Holy Ghost’s promptings. Sometimes those feelings are simply Satan keeping you stuck where you are because he knows you will have a half-life there. He knows that you will spend half of your life disconnected, discontented and convincing your mind of what its heart will never accept. He knows when you have settled, gave up and didn’t try. Inaction is his greatest weapon, while regret is his second.

There are many types of marriage relationships and all of them can work, but none is sadder than the one that doesn't represent peace in your heart.

[The book, Anna Karenina, is] a mirror held up to the real, grimy, quotidian interactions of married life, of which romance is little more than a passing mood: marriage, that slippery social contract that, if it works at all, depends more on indulgent disconnection than on some kind of sacred accord.

You make out with a boy because he’s cute, but he has no substance, no words to offer you. His mouth tastes like stale beer and false promises. When he touches your chin, you offer your mouth up like a flower to to be plucked, all covered in red lipstick to attract his eye. When he reaches his hand down your shirt, he stops, hand on boob, and squeezes, like you’re a fruit he’s trying to juice. He doesn’t touch anything but skin, does not feel what’s within. In the morning, he texts you only to say, “I think I left the rest of my beer at your place, but it’s cool, you can drink it. Last night was fun.” You kiss a girl because she’s new. Because she’s different and you’re twenty two, trying something else out because it’s all failed before. After spending six weekends together, you call her, only to be answered by a harsh beep informing you that her number has been disconnected. You learn that success doesn’t come through experimenting with your sexuality, and you’re left with a mouth full of ruin and more evidence that you are out of tune. You fall for a boy who is so nice, you don’t think he can do any harm. When he mentions marriage and murder in the same sentence, you say, “Okay, okay, okay.” When you make a joke he does not laugh, but tilts his head and asks you how many drinks you’ve had in such a loving tone that you sober up immediately. He leaves bullet in your blood and disappears, saying, “Who wants a girl that’s filled with holes?” You find out that a med student does. He spots you reading in a bar and compliments you on the dust spilling from your mouth. When you see his black doctor’s bag posed loyally at his side, you ask him if he’s got the tools to fix a mangled nervous system. He smiles at you, all teeth, and tells you to come with him. In the back of his car, he covers you in teethmarks and says, “There, now don’t you feel whole again.” But all the incisions do is let more cold air into your bones. You wonder how many times you will collapse into ruins before you give up on rebuilding. You wonder if maybe you’d have more luck living amongst your rubble instead of looking for someone to repair it. The next time someone promises to flood you with light to erase your dark, you insist them you’re fine the way you are. They tell you there’s hope, that they had holes in their chest too, that they know how to patch them up. When they offer you a bottle in exchange for your mouth, you tell them you’re not looking for a way out. No, thank you, you tell them. Even though you are filled with ruins and rubble, you are as much your light as you are your dark.

If you never listen, you can't see. The devil has got so many people so disconnected that they cannot even listen or even sense when the Lord is speaking.

I’ve sometimes found it difficult to mark the passage of time in my own life. Being untethered, thrilling though it often is, also means being unstuck in time for much of the time. I’m disconnected from nearly every ritual commonly used to mark progress and worthiness: engagement parties, weddings, baby showers, children’s birthdays, children’s school years, marriage anniversaries, Mother’s Day.

When you go home at night, let your home be the place where you disconnect from the world and the grind of your job. Limit your social-media usage. Surfing Facebook keeps you connected physically, relationally, and emotionally to friends, work, and responsibilities. In turn, you wear down.

The modern urban-industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth. At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and expert sets up a profit-making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation. Together, these disconnections add up to a condition of critical ill health, which we suffer in common—not just with each other, but with all other creatures. Our economy is based upon this disease. Its aim is to separate us as far as possible from the sources of life (material, social, and spiritual), to put these sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to sell them to us at the highest profit.

Sexual taboos are man’s invention. Sexual repression and misogyny are the result of a paternalistic society with a fundamental disconnect from its own basic nature. From angry, gynophobic mullahs hell-bent on covering women up to their eyeballs, to the denizens of Vatican City, who look and dress like a bunch of drag queens, some truly perverted individuals have been allowed to make the sex rules for everyone else. Marriage

As the Harvard Gazette summarized in 2017: Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives. . . . Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes. That finding proved true across the board among both the Harvard men and the inner-city participants.[7] Men who’d had warm childhood relationships with their parents earned more as adults than men whose parent-child bonds were more strained. They were also happier and less likely to suffer dementia in old age. People with strong marriages suffered less physical pain and emotional distress over the course of their lives. Individuals’ close friendships were more accurate predictors of healthy aging than their cholesterol levels. Social support and connections to a community helped insulate people against disease and depression. Meanwhile, loneliness and disconnection, in some cases, were fatal.

Perhaps the greatest irony in the marriage debate is that selfdescribed born-again Christians, a segment of the population that is often vocal about supporting bans on same-sex marriage, seem to exhibit greater problems with their own marriages. Evangelical pollster George Barna found that during the 1990s born-again Christians had higher divorce rates than non-Christians.79 Professor Brad Wilcox, a Christian sociologist who specializes in family issues, notes that “compared with the rest of the population, conservative Protestants are more likely to divorce.” He also points out that divorce rates are higher in the southern United States, where conservative Protestants make up a higher percentage of the population.80 The states of Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas, which voted overwhelmingly for constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriage in 2004, had three of the highest divorce rates in the United States. In contrast, the state with the lowest divorce rate is Massachusetts, a state whose Supreme Court has ruled in favor of gay marriage.81 There is clearly a disconnect between the problems facing heterosexual marriages in the United States and the conservatives’ proposed solution of banning same-sex marriage.

The modern urban-industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth. At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and expert sets up a profit-making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation. Together, these disconnections add up to a condition of critical ill health, which we suffer in common -- not just with each other, but with all other creatures. Our economy is based upon this disease. Its aim is to separate us as far as possible from the sources of life (material, social, and spiritual), to put these sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to see them to us at the highest profit. It fragments the Creation and sets the fragments into conflict with one another. For the relief of the suffering that comes of this fragmentation and conflict, our economy proposes, not health, but vast "cures" that further centralize power and increase profits... Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health -- and create profitable diseases and dependencies -- by failing to see the direction connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. And such a solution, unlike the typical industrial solution, does not cause new problems.

I have often been struck by what many regard as the most haunting of C. S. Lewis’s poems—the sonnet titled “Reason,” probably written in the early 1920s. Lewis here contrasts the clarity and strength of reason (symbolised by Athene, the “maid” of the poem) with the warm darkness and creativity of the imagination (Demeter, the earth-mother). For Lewis, the big question is this: Is there anyone who can be “both maid and mother” to him?[180] Who indeed could achieve such a fusion, reconciling what many would see as polar opposites? At the intellectual level, Lewis was searching for a true marriage of reason and imagination—something that eluded him totally as a young man. It seemed to him then that his life of the mind was split into two disconnected hemispheres. “On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow ‘rationalism.’”[181] Lewis’s later discovery of the Christian faith offered him a synthesis of reason and imagination which he found persuasive and authentic till the end of his life.

Betrayal is neat. It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the ways you didn’t show up for your partner, the harm you might have done. Betrayal is neat because no matter what else happened—if you argued about work or the kids, if you lacked intimacy, if you were disconnected and lonely—it’s as if that person doused everything with lighter fluid and threw a match. Sometimes I wonder: If there had been no postcard, no notebook, would our marriage have survived? I don’t know. That’s the truth.

Yeah I see,” Syn said quietly. Ro’s phone rang and he picked it up, giving Syn a couple of private minutes, which were needed because his heart was beating a mile a minute. The fates can’t be that cruel. To make the only man, no forget that; the only person that Syn had been interested in in over ten years a suspect in a murder case he was overseeing. On top of everything else, the man is married. This isn’t good. Ro disconnected his call and Syn asked him, “How soon before this one arrives?” “He’s already here in room five. You coming?” Ro asked, taking Furious’ file from his hands. “I’ll watch.” Syn walked beside Ro to the interrogation rooms. Then he thought better of it, and decided he needed to be honest with his men. They worked effectively together, but most of all they had each other's backs. Ro was a good man and Syn felt he could trust him. “Ro wait.” “What’s up?” Syn blew out a breath and scratched at the hair on top of his head, which was grown out enough that it was already starting to curl. “Syn what’s going on?” Ro looked genuinely concerned, his vibrant blue eyes staring intently at him. Syn looked back and forth as uniforms brushed passed them in the hall. Ro clasped a firm grip on Syn’s shoulder and ushered him into one of the vacant offices. “Talk to me man. You’re my Sarge but I consider you a friend first. That’s the way we operate. If you have a problem, then I have a fuckin’ problem, and so do twenty-one other men. But between you and me right now, what’s up?” Syn rubbed the back of his neck and tried to ease some of the tension there. “This guy Furious.” Ro shook his head indicating he was listening. “I’m kind of, um … we uh … he’s my,” Syn stuttered not quite finding the right words. “You know him and you like him,” Ro finished for him. Syn looked Ro in the eye. “Yeah, I like him.” Syn took a deep breath. “He’s the first him that I’ve liked in a very long time.” “I see.” Ro rubbed his hand over his cheek again. Syn knew the gesture meant Ro was thinking. “Shit’s all fucked up now. I can’t date a goddamn suspect, a married goddamn suspect.” “Hey whoa. We don’t know the situation with the marriage yet. The reasons I thought he could be a suspect? They might be easily explained away.” “You’re the one said you think he’s hiding something,” Syn argued. “Yes, I did. This guy is married, right? He leaves his husband in a way that makes the man file a missing persons on him, and then Furious changes his name, and not back to his birth name. It looks like he’s hiding from him, I just need to find out why.” Ro pulled a paper from the file. “This shows him making regular deposits to an account in a bank located in Los Angeles. The account is under a different name and has over ninety thousand dollars in it.” “So he stole his husband’s money and hauled ass in the middle of the night. Fuckin’ great.” Syn yanked the door open, ready to charge into interrogation room five and tell Furious he could go to hell. “Geez, hold on a minute, Sarge.” Ro grabbed his arm and pulled him back inside, slamming the door closed. “No wonder Day likes you so much. Both of you go off half-cocked all the fucking time. That money wasn’t stolen. It was life insurance proceeds from when his father died. He might’ve been hiding it from the husband. The contributions he’s been making since then have been small but frequent.” “He’s a porn star, Ronowski! I can’t date a damn porn star! Fucking other women and probably men. What the fuck?” Syn was yelling and pacing now. He knew it wasn’t fair to yell at Ro, but he was the only one there now.

The temptation of being desperate, in-search-of, willingness-to-settle, must be addressed and dealt with inside your heart. You’ve already been in a tragic marriage where you thought you had made an intelligent decision to marry many years ago, only to wake up morning after morning, more alone in a bad marriage than you would have ever felt staying single. We are also very familiar with having our growth cut off and living years in servitude or quiet desperation, fear, hopelessness, or numbness, wondering if this is what marriage is all about. Now that you’re divorced, please relax and give yourself time to emotionally calm down, even as hungry and as needy as you are. You are seeking union with someone willing to work with you, work well within the confines of your faults and his/hers, who is willing to communicate easily, and be emotionally available to take it to the next step: emotional/spiritual union. Without all those caveats in place, without those guarantees tested by proof, time, and weathered trials, you might as well stay single. Does that sound too harsh? There is nothing worse than being in a one-sided, miserable, emotionally disconnected marriage.

The spiritual problem behind men who mistreat women and children is often rooted in a deep-seated issue of: 1. Lack of self-control and submission to God (Proverbs 25:28) 2. Pride and arrogance (Proverbs 21:24) 3. Unforgiveness and bitterness (Matthew 6:15) 4. Unrepentant heart and refusal to seek help (Proverbs 29:1) 5. Disconnection from God's love and grace (1 John 4:8) 6. Satanic influence and deception (Ephesians 6:12) 7. Unhealed trauma and pain (Psalm 34:18) 8. Misunderstanding of masculinity and strength (Matthew 20:25-28) 9. Rebellion against God's design and authority (Romans 8:7) 10. Blindness to the value and dignity of women and children (Psalm 139:13-14) These spiritual issues can lead men to perpetuate harm and abuse, causing destruction and pain in the lives of those around them. However, with repentance, seeking help, and surrender to God, healing and transformation are possible (2 Corinthians 5:17).

COLM O’GORMAN: I feel very, very strongly from my own professional perspective that if any organisation is seeking to advance the human rights of any group of individuals or population, it’s incredibly important that their positions are fully informed by an engagement with that population and with those people. So rights holders’ participation, and active rights holders’ participation, is incredibly important. And ensuring that your campaign and your calls are representative, and reflect what that rights-holder group actually want, as opposed to your assessment of it, even if you’re a member of that group, is absolutely vital. I think it’s fair to say that there was a disconnect between the case that was presented for civil partnership and the lived reality for LGBT people. Now, I don’t know if that was GLEN’s fault or even their responsibility – GLEN are GLEN, you know, they were an organisation doing a piece of work, and their structure is their structure, and their constitution is the way that they’re constituted, but I do think that there needed to be more of a considered engagement with the LGBT community in all of its diversity, you know? And it’s not white, middle-class, male, single, with concerns about pensions and inheritance and income tax and property. Those are very real concerns for people, but they’re very limited. They deny the reality of huge numbers of people. Absolutely women, and men who aren’t concerned with that. Again, it’s been really interesting in the context of the whole debate that we’ve had on prejudice [in early 2014] that you know one of the things that I think was most valuable about what Rory was certainly saying, and it’s something I feel very strongly too – prejudice is nobody’s dominion. Look at this community. Look at how this community treated lesbians. Look at the view of lesbians in this community. Or transgender people particularly. There’s no point in imagining or pretending that the LGBT community would be very different from wider society, and that power and influence wouldn’t be almost automatically in the hands of educated, middle-class, middle-aged men. That’s the way the world has been. And it’s changing thankfully, but it’s the way the world has been.

But love alone without any real investment or attention causes a slow, steady deterioration of our connection to one another. And because it happens so gradually over the course of years or decades, the disconnection that occurs often goes unnoticed until the gap between the two of you feels almost too far to bridge.

Dating is like a game without a rule book—every move is a gamble, every strategy uncertain. Yet, it's in the unpredictability that the magic of connection or disconnection unfolds.

His shame is too great to allow him to understand her fear, and her fear keeps her from seeing his shame. When they try to alleviate their feelings of vulnerability in opposite ways—by talking and not talking—all they end up sharing are disappointment and heartache. Your relationship can fail with neither of you doing anything wrong, if you do not understand the extent to which fear and shame drive your disconnection from each other. Understanding each other's core vulnerabilities and learning how to manage them will give you a new perspective on your relationship—a dual perspective based on both points of view—that leads to compassionate connection and love beyond words.

Silence. Talk may be cheap and silence may be golden, but not in a relationship. When you’re in love, communication helps you both open your minds and assists in creating a strong bond. Do both of you spend your evenings watching your favorite television shows after work, and hardly talk about anything with each other? It may seem like a perfect way to relax after a tiring and long day, but over time, this lack of communication will disconnect you from each other. And soon enough, both of you won’t have anything to share with each other because your minds and ideas are so far apart.

Love is a constant process of tuning in, connecting, missing and misreading cues, disconnecting, repairing and finding deeper connection.

We functioned. We remained committed to each other. But how was it that we felt so disconnected when permanently connected by a shared tragedy?

Judgment breeds disconnection and contempt; curiosity breeds connection and understanding.

Here’s the thing: Betrayal is neat. It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the ways you didn’t show up for your partner, the harm you might have done. Betrayal is neat because no matter what else happened—if you argued about work or the kids, if you lacked intimacy, if you were disconnected and lonely—it’s as if that person doused everything with lighter fluid and threw a match. Sometimes I wonder: If there had been no postcard, no notebook, would our marriage have survived? I don’t know. That’s the truth.